It turns out 13 months kind of snuck up on me - I had still been saying Josie "just" turned a year old, even up until she was 4 days away from turning 13 months. Oops.
So, lots of changes are afoot with Miss Josie. She is still not really walking (on her own) or talking (using actual English words), but she's making progress! I believe she moo-ed along with me last week when I was reading/making animal sounds for her, and she possibly also said "bacon".
Josie willingly has started taking a few steps on her own now - so no longer only when we yoink our fingers out from her hands when she's already walking, or by propping her up just right so she can walk between us. She is still very, very cautious though. She cruises around the furniture much more now, so when she decides she's going to walk over to us, she'll cruise along the couch until she's a couple feet away, then will ever so carefully turn herself around and walk the one or two steps left to get to us. And then she claps for herself :) She also has figured out stairs in the last few days, so she can climb all the way to the top of the stairs now, although she's not quite as good at getting back down. Unfortunately, now that she knows how to go up stairs, the one step down into our living room is no longer sufficient as a baby barrier, so we can't put her in the living room and expect her to stay there for long.
[This is the face she gives me when she really just wants me to come save her - but only with two hands! She had refused my help when I only offered one hand for her to hold onto ;)]
Josie is starting to mimic our actions more now, which is really neat to see. She tries to help comb her hair, or put shoes on me (or on herself), all with very limited success so far though.
[Trying to maneuver her feet into Ryan's shoes didn't go too well]
After meeting my goal of nursing for a year, I'm also almost done weaning Josie. There were several factors - and plenty of thoughtful consideration - that went into this decision, and yet that hasn't stopped me from being sad about it. It probably isn't helping that she hasn't been taking to this transition too well - I've started mixing whole cow's milk into her bottles over the last few weeks, and she has alternated between seemingly tolerating it to flatout refusing to drink it (to the point where one day last week she refused to drink any of her milk at daycare). But then today she drank two mixed bottles (which is as many as she used to drink before I started mixing her bottles, but she had dropped down to maybe one a day at daycare since then) and then had some straight cow's milk after that when she was still hungry. So hopefully she's coming around on this - that would probably help alleviate some of my stress with the situation. I may be overthinking this, but I've been trying to make this a pretty slow transition by dropping a feeding a week over the course of a month, and I've been watching for any signs of stress in her. She has been more huggy lately, but I think it may be coincidence and she's probably still ok - it seems more that she just happened to get mobile enough recently to get herself over to us on her own when she wants some attention.
Although Ryan took over nap duty for Josie a few weeks back, I'm still putting her down at night for the next couple of weeks. Then, once she is weaned, Ryan will start putting her down at night too, since I'm assuming she won't be too happy if I try to put her down myself with a bottle instead of nursing her. She may prove me wrong (and hopefully she will!), but I suspect we'll have some rough nights when she realizes I won't be nursing her back to sleep when she wakes up overnight (which she still does, usually once a night around 3 or 4am), although I think she'll do ok initially going down for the night without nursing since she hasn't been falling asleep while nursing lately anyway. I've been putting her in her crib awake more often than asleep over the last few weeks, and although we usually seem to have to go through a couple minutes of (fake) crying before she settles down, she's been going to sleep pretty well if I just stay in the room with her. She is still in our room (she'll be moving into her own room once we move into the new house), but is sleeping in her crib very nearly full-time at night now, except for maybe a couple times a week when I leave her in bed if she's asleep after her overnight feeding.
Miscellaneous cuteness:
[These coupons were her preferred form of entertainment last weekend]
[Sometimes she's an odd little duck]
No comments:
Post a Comment